The first tonal prophet and poet of the modern era, the era in which reason made tremendous protest against mere dogma, and the best religious instincts of human nature called imperatively for emancipation and for nearer individual contact with God, is Johann Sebastian Bach. We look dazzled at the brilliant victories of the Italian Renaissance, and amid tumultuous beauty run riot with imagination we hear the voice of Savonarola at the close of the period uttering his lamentations. The great Italian reformer saw and felt that in his own day and in his own country the glory and beauty of the movement had vanished in sensuality; that hardness of heart and indifference to primary human needs had diverted the waters of the Renaissance from their main fertilizing channel.
The deep need of the epoch was social, not mental, sociality in its widest sense: the right of the individual; his inherent majesty, which the accident of birth should not be able to impair—this and this only was the natural outcome of the new birth which came to humanity; this and this only was the sequel which German profundity and integrity, not Italian brilliancy and carelessness, placed before the mind of Europe.
The Reformation, then, this Protestantism, is distinctive of the new era. It was a protest, not only religious, as the word is usually applied, but scientific. It is the basis in the modern Western world of those laws of criticism which have submitted, or will submit, everything to searching analytical investigation, and as in the case of the natural world, so in the moral and ethical, men, by the light of revealed truth, or by those higher instincts of nobility which emanate from the Eternal Love, seek to apply to the reformation of society those principles of love, justice, and recompense which each would wish applied individually to self.
As an inspirer of thought and man of action, the world has seen few such men as Luther. His genius, as it were, discovered and laid bare the inexhaustible treasures of the German language; his sympathy and genial humanity sent a thrill of song, poetical and tonal, throughout the fatherland. He was the great awakener of German emotion. To Luther, a man who cared not for song was without the pale of humanity. But his enthusiasm was practical. In the church, as we have seen, he gathered from all sources whatever was of the best, and gave it to the people. In the schools he advocated the cause of song. In the streets the people needed not advocacy. Wherever two or three gathered together, song was in the midst of them, and it is not too much to say that the Lutheran hymn was the saviour of German poetry and a font of German song. In the seventeenth century there was in Germany little poetry worthy of the name save that inspired by the devotional character of Luther's genius. His heir and successor in the realm of tone was Sebastian Bach.
True, two centuries had elapsed between the death of the great reformer in morals and the birth of the great reformer in tone; but the work of the latter could not have been without the former. The chorale was introduced by Luther; it was perfected by Bach. To what other influence than the Lutheran can we attribute the growth of Bach? Are there any other resources of German art and thought which can account for the advent of the great musician? In art Duerer stood by the side of Luther. In him again we find a man. Thought, thought! help me to express my native thought. Teach me to express in my art the reality of Nature, its wonderful beauty, thrice beautiful to me an artist; the pathos of life, its realism, far apparently from the ideal, yet most precious to me as a man. This was the aim of Duerer, and he seems a man after the Lutheran mould.
The aim of Duerer may be found in some respects in Bach's work, because both men were men of integrity, great and patient in soul. This, of course, is not to say that Bach was affected by Duerer, but is merely an endeavor to find what was noblest in Germany preceding Bach. One more allusion. In Bach's art we trace the mystic; not shadowy outpourings of hysterical emotion, but beauties of eternal verities disclosed in vision—faint, it is true—to none save the noblest of mortals.
One such kindred spirit preceding Bach was Boehme, the father of German mysticism, the poor cobbler, whose soul lay far away in the regions of celestial love, and whose utterance is of the realities thereof. These three men, Luther, Duerer, Boehme, are those to whom the great musician Bach is akin, but he is truly the child of the former, and the father of the highest aspirations in instrumental music.
For confirmatory evidence we have only to trace the growth of the Bach family. The progenitor, Veit Bach, was born at Wechmar, near Gotha, in 1550, and, following his trade as a baker, settled, after considerable wanderings, near the Hungarian frontier. Veit Bach was a stanch Lutheran. Whether the Lutheran services had given him a love of music, or whether they had only quickened a constitutional sympathy, it is impossible to say. Certain it is that he was passionately fond of music, and, cast for a period among a population whose emotions found constant and ready utterance in tone, he brought back to Wechmar, whither he had returned on account of religious persecution, his beloved cythringa and the art of playing it. There is evidence that this knowledge afforded him consolation and enjoyment in the quiet monotony of his life. While the mill was working, Veit Bach was often playing; and doubtless the peculiar charm and rhythm of old Hungarian melodies, songs of the people, which he had learned from the wandering gypsies, recurred to him, as well as those grand devotional hymns on which he had been nourished from childhood. We have said that Veit Bach was a stanch Lutheran. From father to son through generations, the Lutheran doctrine, pure and undefiled, had been handed down, accompanied by the musical gift, until both, uniting in Sebastian Bach, born at Eisenach in 1685, served to glorify the Lutheran chorale and the art which perfected it.
Again, the traditions of the great reformer must have been imbibed by Sebastian Bach from infancy. Surrounding his native town lay a circle of wooded heights, from one of which arose the Wartburg, that illustrious shrine of the German nation whither in mediæval and modern times her sons have repaired to exhibit and replenish their lamp of genius. There the minnesingers had gathered in contest a song; thither as a modern Elijah came the great monk, weary of soul, yet whose immortal genius unfolded the page of Sacred Writ; and down the wood-clad slope came issuing the melody of the Hebrew psalmist, translated into German speech and entering into German hearts, mingled with the narrative of the Redeemer's passion lit by awful and solemn glory of Eternal Love. Who shall say that young Bach knew not of these things? Who will contend that, when his genius matured and ripened, the immortal tones in which the eternal passion was portrayed owed nothing to this sympathy of association, this spiritual life with the great reformer born two centuries before?
Yet once more. The Bach family was full of affection and sympathy one toward the other. Each year witnessed a reunion of the various members of the family scattered throughout Thuringia, and each came bearing the gift of music. As a child among the elders we can imagine how the young Sebastian revered his uncles, Johann Christopher and Michael Sebastian, in whom were conserved and developed the Lutheran tonal principles and traditions; how he somewhat feared the austere character of his elder brother, Johann Christopher, to whose charge he was intrusted upon the death of his father.